


with each change, i change, too

by ShowMeAHero



Category: Scream (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, Fluff, Kissing, Love Confessions, Post-Canon, Post-Scream 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:14:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26323978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShowMeAHero/pseuds/ShowMeAHero
Summary: “Hey, Sid?” Dewey asks from her front doorway. Sidney scrubs at her face with her hands before turning back to him. Mark and Gale have both long since driven off; she’s not waving at anyone anymore, but just zoned out. Just thinking. “You want me to head off, too?”Sidney hesitates.
Relationships: Sidney Prescott & Dewey Riley, Sidney Prescott/Dewey Riley
Comments: 7
Kudos: 17





	with each change, i change, too

**Author's Note:**

> genuinely shocked to find nobody writing this so i guess we're taking matters into our own hands?!
> 
> this story takes place immediately after scream 3!! but with a few things changed (as you will soon see).
> 
> also, this is for [redacted]!
> 
> title yoinked from ["elegia" by new order](https://open.spotify.com/track/2Xs7CP4Gw8wJ8qX8fkrCAB?si=9xcC_tIGQQChVAgYdEo7Rw)!

As much as Sidney enjoys spending time with Mark and catching up with Gale, she’s also exhausted. It’s been a long few—

Well, it’s been a long few years, really. She hasn’t been able to really relax since all this started. It feels like it was a lifetime ago, even if it really hasn’t been anymore than five years or so, now, since her mother was killed. She feels like it’s been fifty years, maybe, or five hundred; she feels ancient and old and just— tired. She’s tired.

“Hey, Sid?” Dewey asks from her front doorway. Sidney scrubs at her face with her hands before turning back to him. Mark and Gale have both long since driven off; she’s not waving at anyone anymore, but just zoned out. Just thinking. “You want me to head off, too?”

Sidney hesitates. Her instinct is to say _yes,_ to ask him to leave so she can be alone, but she doesn’t know what she’d do beyond that. She’s been spending _all_ this time alone. It’s getting kind of old.

Even though she automatically wants to tell Dewey to leave, she says, “No, you don’t have to.”

“Alright, yeah.” He smiles at her, shoving his hands in his pockets and leaning in the doorframe. After a beat of hesitation where neither of them speaks, she only belatedly thinks that he might have been looking for an out.

“Unless you wanted to go,” she says. “You don’t have to— I don’t want you to feel like you have to stay, I’ll be fine on my own. If you wanted to… I don’t know, if you wanted to go catch up with Gale or something.”

Dewey furrows his brow, glancing back over his shoulder into her house. “Are you worried about the place? Have you installed security? Because if you haven’t, you—” He cuts himself off with a frown. “I just caught up with Gale. Why would I want to go catch up with Gale?”

 _“Why?”_ Sidney echoes. She turns back to him, incredulous, but he looks just as helplessly confused as he’d sounded. “Because— I don’t know. You two always hit it off when you’re together. And when you were out here earlier, I don’t know, I just figured…” She trails off at Dewey’s bewildered expression. “Was I wrong?”

“I was just talking to her,” Dewey tells her. “I mean, that’s it, Sid, really, I— We, yeah, we’ve dated before but I— We were saying how we—” Dewey stops and takes a breath, looking down at his feet. He kicks the toe of one boot into the heel of the other. His eyes stay down when he says, “We agreed it wasn’t really a good idea anymore. You know, mu— mutually. It was a mutual decision.”

“Why isn’t it a good idea anymore?” Sidney asks. Dewey hesitates, then steps backwards into her house. He only goes one step before looking back to her, motioning with his chin towards the inside. She slips past him through the door, barely brushing him.

In all honesty, she’d forgotten how good it felt to be so close to another person. Besides her dad, Dewey is the only person she’s always known she could trust, and being alone with him almost feels like being comfortable and safe again. It’s not as secure as being alone feels, but it’s— better, in its own way. It’s good to know someone else is there with her, and it’s even better to know that that person is someone she trusts and loves who trusts and loves her, too.

Dewey shuts her front door softly behind them with a gentle click. He locks it for her; she hears the snap of the lock sliding into place.

“You can leave it unlocked, if you want,” Sidney tells him. “I don’t want to be afraid of the world anymore, you know, and be— be locked inside my own house all the time.”

Dewey looks to her, then back to the lock with a raised eyebrow. “That makes a lot of sense, Sid, and I’m real proud of you for it, but—” He stops himself, then sighs and says with a small smile, “I mean, you _should_ probably still lock your door. I lock _my_ door.”

“I think the two of us are bad enough to scare off anything that tried to come in,” she says. He laughs. “But you should probably leave the door locked, you’re right.”

“Yeah, I figured,” he says. The two of them stand in silence for another moment, long enough that it starts to get a little awkward again. It feels a little ridiculous, to her, that they’ve been through everything they’ve both been through in their lives and she can _still_ be nervous and he can _still_ be terrified.

“Do you want—” she starts to ask, just as Dewey says, “If you wanted, we could—”

She laughs and tells him, “Go ahead,” and he says, “I don’t like Gale like that. Uhh, anymore, I mean. We were a th— But that’s, that’s actually not important right now.”

“So, you didn’t…” She’s not sure how to ask, so she doesn’t, stopping just short. Dewey takes his hands out of his pockets and twists his fingers together, anxious, before he forces his hands apart and rubs at the back of his head.

“Nah,” he says. He blows out a harsh breath and drops his hands. “For all I know, her and the detective there are about to go on a date right now.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?” she asks.

“No,” he tells her. She goes back to her living room and takes a seat on her sofa; Dewey, for his part, takes the hint and follows her. He sits down a little too far away from her on the couch, though. Wins and losses. “Does it bother you?”

“What? No,” she answers. “Why would that bother me?”

“He’s not an ugly guy,” Dewey says. “Mark, I mean. And he’s pretty interested in you, I think.”

“Well, that’s good for him,” Sidney says. “But I’m not interested in him.”

Dewey hesitates again, but he never actually starts speaking. He just goes quiet, looking down at his hands clasped between his knees. For a moment, it’s like she’s a kid again, sitting in the Rileys’ backyard with Tatum and Dewey while they eat popsicles and wrestle each other in the grass. Before everything went to shit and they knew that horrible things could — and would — happen to them. With a pang, she misses Tatum all over again, like it was just yesterday. For some reason, she still feels fresh, all the time.

“It feels weird,” Sidney confesses quietly. She keeps her eyes locked on a beam of sunlight streaking in through their window.

“Yeah,” Dewey agrees, before asking, “Wait, what does?”

She smiles to herself, dropping her eyes down to her floorboards. The smile falls away when she says, “I don’t know. Being here, I guess. Sometimes, just being alive feels insane.”

“I’m glad you are, though,” Dewey says quickly.

“I’m okay,” she assures him. “I just mean— After everyone we’ve lost, you know. I was just thinking… Sometimes I just think about Tatum, and I just…” Sidney exhales slowly. When Dewey doesn’t say anything, she risks a sidelong glance at him. His face has gone a little blotchy, his eyes a little glassy. He rubs at them with one hand, wiping under them as he turns his head away from her. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”

“No, it’s— It’s okay,” Dewey tells her. “I just try not to— _Shit,”_ he breaks off, when his voice cracks.

“I’m really sorry,” Sidney says. The backs of her eyes burn, too. Instead of just letting it happen, she takes the initiative to move a little bit closer to him on the couch, putting one of her hands over his. He wriggles one of his hands loose to settle over hers.

“I miss her a lot,” Dewey admits quietly. Sidney nods; Dewey squeezes her hand between his. “It never really gets any easier. It’s not— It’s just really not fair, you know? It’s just _not_ fucking fair.”

“It’s not,” Sidney agrees, just as softly. “I miss her, too. I think about her every day.”

Dewey doesn’t speak again, just nodding. He pulls one hand free to scrub at his face again, drying it with the end of his sleeve before he starts to pull away. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s okay,” Sidney says. “I don’t want to just shove things down anymore. I want to be able to just live like a normal person. I don’t want to hide, or pretend that all this— this fucked-up shit didn’t happen to me. I just want to be _normal_ for once, you know?”

“Yeah,” Dewey says. He nods, then repeats, “Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean, Sid. I want to be able to think of her and remember all the good stuff about her instead of—”

Dewey cuts himself off, but the both of them know exactly what he’s thinking about. They both saw the same thing after Tatum died; for all they’ve been through since then, the pain of that never quite goes away.

“I want to talk about her without bringing up all the stuff around how she— how she died,” Dewey continues. “And I want to go to work without people feeling bad for me for all the shit that’s happened to me, and I want to get experience and get promoted like anyone _else,_ and I want to— I want to get myself a cane and not have to think about _why_ I need it. I just want to be myself and not everything that’s happened to me, you know?”

Sidney takes that all in, then says, “Dewey, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Dewey says. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“If it helps,” Sidney offers, “I feel the same way. I don’t want to be a victim — or, the victim people see me as. I _was_ a victim, so I always will be, but I’m also just—” Sidney exhales and thinks about all the words that just flew out of Dewey’s mouth before she says, “I just want to be myself, too.”

“I think you’re yourself,” Dewey tells her. “And I really like the person you are.”

“Yeah?” Sidney asks. She scoots a bit closer, knocks their shoulders together. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

He huffs a laugh, hanging his head to look down at his hands between his knees again. It takes him a moment, but then he says, “Sidney, I really don’t want to mess anything up for you.”

“What do you mean?” Sidney asks, heart starting to race. “Mess up what?”

“You’ve got your whole thing going here,” Dewey says. “And your new life past all this stuff that happened to you. There’s not really…” He stops, then starts again. “I mean, besides Gale, it’s pretty much just you and me left, right?”

“From before?” Sidney asks. It’s terrible, when she thinks about it that way, but it’s true. “I guess so, yeah.”

“I want you to be able to get the fresh start you want,” Dewey says, “is my point, and I know that you can’t get that if I’m hanging around you all the time.”

“I think,” Sidney says, “I’ll have a harder time getting a fresh start if people tell me what I should and shouldn’t do.”

Dewey looks properly abashed, even moreso than he deserves, when he says, “Geez, Sid, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Of course, you can do whatever you want— Well, you know that, you don’t need my permission, I just—”

“It’s okay,” Sidney cuts him off, before he gets himself too worked up. “I just wanted you to realize that I’m perfectly capable of making my own decisions.”

“I know you are,” Dewey says. “I know that, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel like I think otherwise, ‘cause I don’t, at _all._ I promise.”

“Cross your heart?” Sidney asks impulsively. Dewey motions over his heart, smiling.

“Absolutely,” he tells her. “I’m serious, though. You don’t need to feel obligated to spend any time with me. You don’t owe anybody anything.”

“I know that,” Sidney says. “Maybe I just like spending time with you.”

“Sure you do,” Dewey says, disbelieving. “Your friend’s dorky older brother—”

“You haven’t been that for a _long_ time,” Sidney interrupts him.

“Yeah?” he asks.

“You’ve never _just_ been my friend’s brother,” Sidney says. “And, anyways, by now, I’d like to think we’re friends, too.”

“We are!” Dewey says quickly. “No, we definitely are, I didn’t mean that—”

“Dewey, it’s _okay,”_ Sidney assures him. He exhales, scrubbing hard at his face again. “You don’t need to be so nervous. It’s just me.”

“Yeah, well, _you_ aren’t _just_ anyone,” Dewey says, nearly under his breath. Sidney hears him nice and clear, though.

“Tell me if I’m wrong,” Sidney says. Dewey turns to her, brow furrowed in confusion, just as she leans in to kiss him on the cheek. She stops an inch away, hovering; he’s accidentally brought their lips closer together, so she takes the opportunity to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. She does it as softly as she can, careful in case he’s still jumpy, but he doesn’t flinch. He also doesn’t move, though.

When they separate, Sidney’s heart pounds for a long, horrifying moment before Dewey huffs a laugh and says to his hands, “You’re not wrong.”

“You coulda fooled me,” Sidney comments. Dewey laughs again, dropping his face down into his hands. He pushes them back through his hair before turning to Sidney again. “You alright?”

“I’m alright,” he tells her. After a beat, he says, “You know, I— I’m better than alright, right now. I’m actually really glad.”

“You are?” she asks. He nods, so she says, “You know what? Me, too.”

“Yeah?” he asks.

“Yeah.” She leans back, for a moment, then tips into him again. He seems to pause for a moment before putting his hand on her waist. For a beat, he seems unsettled by the placement, but then he slips his other hand up to cup her face so he can kiss her properly. His hand is still a little stiff, like it has been for years now; his fingers don’t move quite smoothly or properly on his right hand, not like they do on his left.

She smoothes her hand up over his and tangles their fingers together as she tips her head. He follows her lead and tips his head, too; she doesn’t think she’s ever been kissed so well before. She tries not to think about times she’s been kissed before — people like Billy and Derek are better forgotten, in moments like these — and instead just focuses on the person she’s kissing _now._ She focuses on Dewey.

He pushes his hand up through her hair to cup the back of her head. She takes it as an invitation to deepen the kiss; she can feel him smile a little bit before he focuses again. He draws her in closer, their thighs pressing up hard against one another as he twists to kiss her fully, tugging at her until she decides to just climb into his lap.

Dewey grips her waist so tight she feels _grounded,_ for the first time in a long time. She really does feel secure, maybe even more secure than she’d felt when she was alone, and isn’t that a shock?

She smiles herself, into the kiss, but makes up for it by deepening it. She cradles Dewey’s face in her hands, then tightens her grip, pushing closer into him and licking inside his mouth. The way he shivers against her does _not_ go unnoticed. It makes her shiver, too, her hands shaking; her chest catches, and she inhales sharply, breaking their kiss.

“You okay?” Dewey asks. Sidney nods. They both hesitate, but it’s not awkward, this time. It’s not tense, it’s just quiet. He slips his hand up her side slowly, stroking over her hip, up over her waist, slowly up. She relaxes against him, tipping to the side, shifting just enough that she can rest her head against his shoulder.

“This feels good,” she comments. She can feel his smile when he kisses her forehead, close to her temple.

“Yeah?” he asks. “I’m glad.” She waits until he realizes, at which point he hastily adds, “I think it feels good, too! I do, this is great, Sid, I’m so glad we’re doing this. I mean, if we are— doing this, I didn’t mean to assume that we—”

“Hey,” Sidney cuts him off. “Slow down, Dewey. One thing at a time.”

“Yeah, of course,” he says. “Right, sorry.”

She lets the silence drag on for another moment, just to tease him a little bit, before she tacks on, “Even if we are definitely doing this.”

 _“Whew,”_ Dewey says, exhaling one huge breath, his shoulders slumping as he relaxes. “Okay, that sounds great! Really great, not to— I mean, not to pressure you or anything, but—”

 _“Dewey,”_ Sidney cuts him off firmly. He looks to her as she lifts his head to tell him, “Be _quiet_ for a second.”

He laughs and starts to say something back, but she kisses him again. She’s softer this time, slower; he tips his head down just a bit, takes her chin between his thumb and forefinger and directs her up to meet him. This press is lazier, languid, and she relaxes, her heart thrumming into an even race. She separates them for a moment so she can take a breath, and he chases after her, kissing the corner of her mouth, then back to center, smiling when she smiles, too.

Dewey’s hand glides up, cupping her face. He strokes his thumb under her eye, then along her cheekbone. She realizes, in this moment, that she was right, all those years ago; she’s tired of running. For now, she thinks, she’s found a place she wouldn’t mind staying put for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> You can (and should!) come chat with me on Twitter at [@nicole__mello](https://twitter.com/nicole__mello) (new @!) and/or on Tumblr at [andillwriteyouatragedy](http://andillwriteyouatragedy.tumblr.com/).


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